Meandered

Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, March - May 2024

The solo exhibition reflects my shifting perception and relationship with the landscape through recent painting, drawing, sculpture, and video works. My work explores the complexities of an Indigenous experience as it relates to personal identity, community relationships, and the essential connection to the land as the source of life, stories, conflict, and healing.

My work often draws inspiration from personal memories and immersive experiences revisiting sites in the northern region of the Navajo reservation (Dinétah) in Arizona and New Mexico, where I grew up, or recently, traversing locations in Colorado, where I currently reside. I liken my recent practice to meandering fieldwork, where I begin artistic research in the natural environment, allowing days-long trips into rural areas to intuitively inform how my multimedia works will unfold and take shape. The exhibition’s title, Meandered is both a metaphor and process, and a framework for exploring the organic patterns or phenomenon in nature.

From energetic, colorful landscape paintings, and a sculpture made from a fallen tree trunk to drawings made while operating a recumbent bicycle, the collection of works on view convey a sense of motion and progression of time indicative of many contemporary interactions between humans and nature. Natural landscapes are often taken in from the window of a moving vehicle, mediated by technology, viewed from our phone or computer screens, or conjured from distant or secondhand memories. Deconstructing romanticized notions of nature, I invite viewers to contemplate the dynamic relationship between humanity and the environment, highlighting the ways in which our perceptions of nature are shaped by modern technologies and the passage of time.